Ask a Badass: Flash Foxy's Shelma Jun

Shelma is the founder of Flash Foxy and creator of the Women's Climbing Festival. Flash Foxy is a multi-media platform created to celebrate women climbing with women and to be a place where women can feel inspired by and connected to each other.

She's a California native, based in Brooklyn, NY, and she loves plugging widgets into horizontal cracks at the Gunks or getting scared on granite highballs in Bishop. Her writing has appeared in Climbing Magazine, Outside Online, and other publications.

Post a question for Shelma here, and next week she'll choose a handful to reply to. Our goal is to foster positive discussion about the state of climbing and to explore how we can be more inclusive as a community.

Your article created quite a stir, for obvious reasons. One arguably valid criticism was that the scope of it was limited to a particular climbing scene in a particular area. Based upon your experiences as a widely-traveled professional climber/writer, do you believe the findings are widely applicable? On a related note, do you plan on conducting any larger follow-up studies to explore this question on a national, or even international level?

Not long ago women went climbing with guys and they were the ones to lead routes and girls to belay, follow or climb on top rope. this attitude was feed also by the girls at the crag but now I sometimes see girls climbing by their own leading, belaying, falling and most importantly having fun.

But so far usually girls that go climbing by themselves are experienced climbers. What do you think is still needed so female climbers massively start to have that attitude of male independency in all skill levels form learning the basics, to their first multipitch to onsight climbing at their max level?.

And now for something completely different: Lately I find it hard to lead routes that have R rating. What ever might be the case, bad pro, run-out, I find consequences more important than the reward. My question would be where do you draw the line between consequences and reward in climbing ? And, does it scare you that sometimes reward outweighs the consequences (even if they are grave)? Thanks